Review: ‘Old Times,’ Where the Past Is a Dangerous Place

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From left, Clive Owen, Eve Best and Kelly Reilly in Douglas Hodge's revival of Harold Pinter's "Old Times," about old friends dredging up their respective versions of the past, at the American Airlines Theater.CreditCreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

Theatergoers who cringe at the sight of a lighted cigarette, be warned: They’re smoking up a smog storm at the American Airlines Theater, where Douglas Hodge’s overwrought revival of Harold Pinter’s “Old Times” opened on Tuesday night. And they’re not just puffing discreetly and defensively, the way those poor huddled herds of New Yorkers do outside office buildings on their coffee breaks.

No, this flamboyant production’s three vibrant performers – Eve Best, Kelly Reilly and Clive Owen – are brandishing their cigarettes with a glamorous fury not seen since Bette Davis was the nicotine queen of the movie melodrama. Like Davis, they know the value of punctuating a threat with a staggered exhalation of gray clouds.

So when I say that sparks fly in this play — a 1971 portrait of a man, a woman and her friend discovering how much and how little they know about one another — I am not speaking metaphorically, or at least not only so. Once you can see past the, uh, smoke screen, there’s evidence of real emotional embers smoldering among this talented ensemble, who are just waiting for the moment to turn into human flamethrowers.

If you’ve seen “Old Times” before, and retain fond memories of its quiet creeping impact, Mr. Hodge’s flashy production for the Roundabout Theater Company may well irritate you. As the star of Broadway revivals of “La Cage Aux Folles” and “Cyrano de Bergerac,” Mr. Hodge established himself as a most unreticent British actor, at ease with grand gestures and pyrotechnic displays of feeling.

Applying such attention-getting overstatement to an artist of the unspoken like Pinter sounds a trifle misguided. But it’s in keeping with the tone of the most recent big-name Pinter revival on Broadway, Mike Nichols’s 2013 production of “Betrayal,” starring Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, which scaled up that melancholy play’s boudoir-farce elements.

This “Old Times,” too, might be described as an example of Pinter for the Hard of Understanding (i.e., Americans), or for audiences who might otherwise be bored by dialogue in which characters seldom say — or know — what they mean, and spend a lot of time saying nothing at all. Those celebrated Pinter pauses, which classically loom like a purpose-devouring black hole, are in this version plugged with electronic music by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.

The designer Christine Jones gives explicit form to Pinter’s notion of lives poised on an abyss of nothingness, with a living-room framed by a landscape of charred black rock, which in turn is overseen by a stylized cosmos scored with concentric arcs. And though I warned you about the cigarettes, I didn’t mention the blinding flashes of light. This is Pinter with apocalyptic special effects, “Old Times: Armageddon.” And at 70 minutes, it’s far shorter than your average end-of-the-world movie.

So what’s an honorable thespian to do with such stiff competition from the technical crew? The answer: raise the performing level a few notches, and play to the back of the house. Fortunately, Ms. Best, Ms. Reilly and Mr. Owen, a film star making a much anticipated Broadway debut here, are skilled and charismatic enough to fulfill these requirements without entirely overwhelming the play’s more subtle essence.

“Old Times” concerns memory as a tool of power, and power as the defining dynamic of any relationship. And this cast always makes it clear, with histrionic relish, as to who’s on top at any given moment.

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Ms. Best, sitting, portrays an old friend who visits Ms. Reilly, standing, and Mr. Owen as Ms. Reilly’s husband.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

The plot is as simple and endlessly convoluted as that of most Pinter plays. Deeley (Mr. Owen) and his wife, Kate (Ms. Reilly), have been living quietly in isolation in the country when a disruptive visitor turns up.

That’s Anna (Ms. Best), with whom Kate shared a flat in London when they were both young women, and there’s much catching up to do. But in Pinter, nobody ever catches up with the past. And as Kate and Anna describe their shared life together, the picture keeps changing not only in focus but also in composition.

Deeley, the odd man out (which, not incidentally, is the title of a movie discussed here), seems determined to interject himself into that bygone feminine world, to change its chemistry with a little testosterone. What’s happening is the competition that emerges whenever we realize that the person to whom we feel closest shares exclusive, intimate memories with someone else.

Anna and Deeley face off with proprietary descriptions of Kate and mutating accounts of a past they may or may not have all shared. It’s a battle that reaches absurdist heights as they break into different fragments of songbook standards, like “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” sung in aggressive counterpoint.

In most productions of this play (and I’ve seen four or five, all in London), this battle is generally conducted at the level of normal conversation. The subversive, surrealist elements assert themselves furtively, so that before you know it, terra firma has become terra incognita.

In Mr. Hodge’s interpretation, everyone exists in a five-alarm state of tension from the get-go, with equally heightened poses and inflections. Ms. Reilly finds a little-girl petulance in Kate’s seeming passivity, while Ms. Best’s Anna is worldly to the point of vampishness. Mr. Owen underscores Deeley’s beleaguered air of machismo with a self-parodying, lounge lizard swagger.

This approach, verging on caricature, makes “Old Times” more obviously funny than it usually is, and the desperation within the triangle reads larger. The sum effect is to clarify the themes of sexuality and struggle in “Old Times.”

Less felicitously, this more-is-more sensibility can also make the script seem self-parodyingly pretentious. The mysteries of cryptic, poetic dialogue are more easily accepted when they’re delivered by a whisper instead of a shout.

Though this is not, you may have gathered, an “Old Times” for purists, it has its pleasures. There are moments of barbed erotic engagement, among the three cast members in different combinations, that are intriguingly fraught with the danger for which Pinter’s name is a byword. And I’ve seldom seen a cast so palpably enjoying delivering Pinter’s dialogue, even if it often here feels closer to Noël Coward.

Ms. Best (memorably seen on Broadway in Pinter’s “The Homecoming” and O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten”), Ms. Reilly and especially Mr. Owen appear to have a firm and insightful grasp on their elusive characters. I’d love to see them have the chance to lower their voices, kick off their poses and make themselves more comfortably at home in this ever-discomfiting play.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Recalling Fond Memories Can Be a Dangerous Thing. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe